Waste Law and the Value of Food

This article explores the role of law in an emerging consensus as to the causes of food waste: a structural failure to value food. Food waste’s legal home is waste law. The sagacity of this siting would appear to be self-evident. If there is a body of law concerned with the problem of waste generally, then why not use that body of law to address the challenges of a particular waste stream? We should test this assumption, acknowledging food’s importance and difference as a resource, and keeping in mind structural causes of food waste. This article explores the limitations of waste law through an imbalance in support for anaerobic digestion over redistribution; an imbalance which actively removes edible food from the food supply chain. By underpinning and validating this imbalance, waste law reflects and reinforces structural causes of food waste, rather than providing the analytical tools needed to address the problem.